'en route': Audience Works, Social Aesthetics, and Place-Identity

Practices of art (and architecture) have recently turned toward theories of relationality, embodiment, and affect. This has been accompanied by a shift towards both discourses and design practices that emphasise doing things with space and engaging with what spaces do. Hence, the aesthetics of the city and its spaces can be seen to engage socially with the agency of its audience in a reflexive choreography. Using a contemporary work of live art theatre as a case study, this paper focuses on what we might learn from urban audiences who do things in space, and the agency that arises from live art in urban environments. 'en route' is an audience work conceived by Melbourne-based ensemble 'one step at a time like this' - a walk with an iPod through laneways and buildings in the central city. Using interview material from audiences who have performed en route in Melbourne, Brisbane, and Adelaide, this paper describes and analyses the effects of a site-responsive performance without actors, set, or lights that awakens its urban audiences from their blasé state of distraction. en route is explicitly architectural and social: it is about bodies inhabiting space, the direct and affective experience that connects subjectivity and space, and about place and identity as mutually constituting each other relationally